Close-up photograph of a black ink tattoo of the word Hope in script, with an anchor above and below it, on a patch of skin.

Hope script with anchor tattoo

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the word Hope written in a looping cursive script, with a small anchor above the lettering and a larger anchor below it. The linework is solid black with a slightly textured fill, and there is no colour or shading. The close, slightly soft-focus framing places the design centrally against a warm, dim background of skin.

Lettering Hope Anchor

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The name on the wheelhouse had flaked to nothing by the time we reached Marlow, so when the lock keeper leaned out and asked what we were called, I told him Hope and let him squint at the boat to check. Dad always said a name only needed to be true for the people steering it. He had painted it himself the summer I turned nine, in a looping hand copied from an old tin of Brasso, and the curl of the p had never quite stopped leaning into the river.

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The anchor was older than the boat. It had been his father's, hauled up off a Harwich quay and carried on the cabin roof for thirty years, its fluke bent where it caught a sunken pram below Reading. We never dropped it. Dad said the river was too shallow in places for an anchor to bite and too deep in others for it to find bottom, so what it really held was the idea of holding. When the engine packed up that October, he sat on the cabin step with a spanner and the chain across his knees and didn't say much at all.

I was the one who walked up to the lock that night with the windlass, cold to the wrists, to ask for a tow. The keeper said the lower gates would be open by six. I said we would be waiting. Coming back along the towpath in the dark, I could see our small lamp swinging on its hook, and beneath it the black shape of the anchor on the rail, and for once it looked less like something dragging us down and more like something pointing us towards the far bank.

Dad had the engine running by morning. He never repainted the name, and I never asked him to.